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Spotify app icon on a smartphone
Photo: Fabian Sommer / dpa
The Austrian consumer protection portal Watchlist Internet warns that criminals are currently sending out e-mails purporting to come from Spotify on a large scale.
The perpetrators are therefore trying to gain access to the customer accounts of users in this way in order to get their credit card details.
Accordingly, Spotify customers receive emails from the sender "Spotify invoice" in which they are shown a problem with a payment.
According to the portal, victims are asked to click a button that leads to a fake login page for the music streaming service.
Consumer advocates warn that anyone who enters the required data will send it directly to the criminals.
In addition to the credit card data, access to the Spotify account could also be lost.
recognizable by the wording
According to “Watchlist Internet”, the scam can be recognized quite easily by the same wording: “We cannot bill you.
We hate to break bad news, but there's a problem with your preferred payment method.
Follow these steps to help us resolve this issue.
Your bill.« The subject is always the same: »Your bill 3947291442 requires payment«.
The Austrian consumer advocates give a few tips to help avoid falling for such fake news.
Clear identifiers are:
Spelling, grammatical, and capitalization errors
: As seen in the example above, such errors are found in the subject line.
Real e-mails are always error-free, according to the portal, which is probably a bit exaggerated.
However, such conspicuous spelling weaknesses are really rare with professional providers.
Check the sender of the e-mail
: The sender address of suspicious e-mails (in this case rechnung1@application.com) should be compared with information from the provider on the Internet, for example in their imprint, or with old e-mails.
It often helps to google the given address.
Check the reason for the letter
: Compare the information given in the e-mail with your account with the respective provider and check whether the assertion can be correct.
In addition, according to the consumer advocates, Spotify does not ask you to send personal data by e-mail.
Where does the link go?
To see this, move the mouse pointer to the field with the link and display the Internet address without clicking on it.
If an implausible link appears, consumer advocates advise against clicking on it.
Anyone who has clicked on such a link despite all caution should follow these steps:
Reset your password immediately
contact Spotify if you no longer have access to your account,
forward the email in question to Spotify (spoof@spotify.com),
if you have entered credit card or account details, call your bank and report the incident,
file a report with the police.
mak/dpa
